A benefit of the internet and World Wide Web that has led to its popularity is the dynamic nature of the medium. New information can be updated and promoted quickly and easily to inform customers about a limited time sale or press release. E-mail correspondence is a new medium that corporations can take advantage of on a scheduled basis for emphasizing certain promotions or corporate benefits.
Corporate brand identity is an important part of a company's overall marketing strategy. A strong brand reflects on the performance and accomplishments of the brand's owner. To this end, marketing divisions within an organization centralize the production and quality control of business cards, letterhead, web-page design, collateral and signage. Consistency and uniformity are crucial in establishing a strong brand presence. In this regard, common business practice includes design guidelines and graphic kits to aid divisions or partners in communicating a brand's image effectively.
Electronic mail communication (“e-mail”) has become a primary tool for inter-company communication. Employees often use electronic mail as the primary means of written communication to interact with customers, corporate partners, vendors, and investors.
Despite the importance of a brand identity to a company, companies are unable to effectively use their current e-mail infrastructure to send branded e-mail to recipients. There is no way to manage and control a corporate brand with current electronic mail technologies. This is a significant problem because it doesn't leverage the tremendous investment made in the company's brand or e-mail infrastructure and wastes numerous opportunities to advance this public-relations effort.
In computer network systems such as local-area networks (“LANs”), wide-area networks (“WANs”), and the internet and the world-wide web (“WWW”), electronic mail systems are often utilized to facilitate communication between two or more users of the network. Each user has a unique network address that may be used for routing and identifying purposes in delivering an e-mail message from one user (the “sender”) to another user (the “recipient”) on the network.
Often an e-mail message contains a relatively small amount of text or other forms of data. One or more additional files of data, called “attachments” are often attached to the e-mail message. For example, a word processing file or graphic file that is incompatible with the display capabilities of the e-mail system or that is too large to be conveniently displayed by the e-mail application program may be transmitted from the sender to the recipient by attaching it to an e-mail message. The e-mail message may introduce or explain the attachments. Thus, the recipient receives the e-mail message plus any attached data files, wherein the attached data files must be opened, accessed, or utilized separately from the e-mail message itself. In the alternative, an attachment to the e-mail may be viewed within the e-mail depending on the program used.
HTML formats have become the language of page compositions for web sites. Moreover, objects can be scanned into HTML formats for use in web pages. Composition and display of HTML formats has been added to most mainstream e-mail programs. However, a large time commitment is needed to design HTML e-mail formats with scanned inputs and graphical elements. Hence, this format has not been generally utilized for personal e-mail correspondence, as distinguished from bulk e-mail, due to the limited amount of time typically available for doing such tasks.
Many e-mail programs supply tools to use rich-text formatting (RTF) in electronic messages. This include bold, highlighting, and font colors. Early systems supported this capability only for internal systems or similar clients. As an example, Microsoft Outlook® messages would arrive correctly to other Outlook recipients but formatting would often be lost when viewed in other e-mail clients. This has led to many people not utilizing these features, unsure of how their formatted correspondence will be received.
Microsoft Outlook provides a stationery feature in its application that allows users to use a default template for correspondence. However, this feature is not activated for replies and forwards of existing electronic mail messages. Since a large percentage of correspondence involves replies and back-and-forth communication, many e-mail messages are sent without proper brand identity resulting in lost opportunities. Another limitation is updating the template on a regular basis. Templates are stored locally on each computer that makes managing and updating them a difficult task.
Lotus Notes e-mail client provides a stationery feature for users as a tool to use for form-based correspondence. This feature is not integrated in the “New Memo” features of this application, requiring a separate, additional step to use stationery. Additionally, Notes has the same limitation as Microsoft Outlook in that it does not incorporate replies in its capabilities.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,115 shows correspondence services through its web site to deliver branded electronic or paper-based communication. The service requires extra steps for each e-mail user to take advantage of the service. First, a user account needs to be setup for each individual. Next, address books need to be updated and assigned alternative e-mail ID values. Also, users need to provide alternative e-mail addresses to route mail through this service. However, problems arise. External-oriented service is impractical for confidential communication correspondence. Replies and “cc” messages need to be re-addressed. There is no enforced standardization between individual users within a corporation. Also, corporations are unlikely to use a public service for managing e-mail traffic in this manner.
Another tool for coping with e-mail formatting problems may be to use Adobe's Portable Document Format (“PDF”), which is a powerful format that transmits a document and guarantees that the recipient will be able to read and view the information exactly the way the sender intended. However, PDF creation is a two-step process and is not integrated inline with the message in many popular e-mail applications. PDF's are effective for one-way communication but does not lend itself well for reply situations where individuals respond to a sender's text. It is also time-consuming to create a PDF for every electronic mail message. Furthermore, the attachment form of the e-mail often requires an extra step to read the message, making the process more difficult for the recipient.
A common occurrence in today's corporation is a hybrid of multiple mail systems encompassing Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, sendMail, and other mail server applications arising from separate divisions, mergers and acquisitions, or foreign divisions. It would be desirable for all users to improve a company's brand image through their frequent e-mail communication.
Other types of services provide custom formatting. Web-based electronic greeting card services have been in existence for a number of years. They are a method of formatting electronic text submitted through a web-form or e-mail message. However, electronic greeting cards are extremely limited in their formatting capabilities and extend themselves to a limited amount of text. They do not address e-mail specific attributes including level of importance, reply-text, forwarded text, support for attachments, or customized templates. Additionally, greeting card systems are proprietary and are not designed to work within a high volume e-mail environment.
Individuals use re-mailers to send a message to others where they don't want to be recognized as the sender. These message services do change the e-mail contents by changing the sender and related header information. However, they don't change the content of a message, leaving the look and format of the message identical. These services don't meet the needs of corporate communications.
E-mail marketing has become a significant way to reach targeted, or sometimes untargeted, customers to communicate new information. Newsletters, coupons, press releases, sale promotions, and other timely information are communicated through HTML or text-based messaging to the recipient's e-mail account. This is typically through use of a database-driven e-mail application.
Database driven e-mail messages provide a single tool to communicate with a large audience in a mail-merge type of format. Individual messages or personal communication is not facilitated through these applications. The database-driven e-mail messages often use web-pages with minor personal touches (i.e. name substitution) for communication.
Personal e-mail communication differs and is often used for customer service inquiries, interaction with partners, and one-to-one communication with investors or board members.
While e-mail servers have traditionally focused on IT management and administration tasks, there are no tools currently available that help corporate communication managers control and centrally update the stationery and formatting for all e-mail in the corporate enterprise. That is, IT departments do not currently have the capability to customize personal e-mail communication and to create, update, and manage automatic formatting capabilities.
What is needed is a system and method for automatically incorporating corporate templates in electronic mail, a central tool for corporate communications to dynamically manage and create new e-mail templates, deploy to all e-mail users, and customize the individual template to the sender, recipient, time sent, or workgroup designation. Users should not be burdened with understanding the technology, remembering to add a template to a message, or reformatting a reply manually. The process should be seamless to the user and native in the e-mail environment to which the user is accustomed.